The Malibu Colony is famous—one might safely say fabled—as the playground of movie stars and moguls, in bygone times attracting the likes of Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, Gloria Swanson, Jack L. Warner and even F. Scott Fitzgerald (recalling the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense—“Evil be to him who thinks evil”—the author of The Great Gatsby contemplated the Malibu beach shack he shared with Sheilah Graham and quipped, “Honi soit qui Malibu”). “There’s an awful lot of legend in the Colony,” confirms film producer Donna Arkoff Roth, who owns one of the early houses.

“That’s house, as opposed to cottage or bungalow—house, as in properly proportioned rooms,” Roth’s longtime decorator, Los Angelesñbased Michael S. Smith, proprietorially points out. The edifice in question is a five-bedroom stucco-and-wood mock Tudor put up around 1930 that, in its owner’s words, “faces the ocean in a big, big way—it’s on what my kids call a wave beach.” A wave beach, moreover, whose waves turn out to be celebrated the world over for having an exceptionally well-shaped curl.

A lot of the art that Smith and Roth collected for the house sounds the ancient note of the ocean.

If not urban legend, then shore lore has it that Roth’s house was built and tenanted by the man who came up with “I’m on the Crest of a Wave,” as well as “California, Here I Come” and “The Best Things in Life Are Free”—the great Tin Pan Alley songwriter, Al Jolson protégé, and Broadway and Hollywood producer Buddy DeSylva. “He evidently had his music room in what’s now a little curtained alcove in my living room,” she says, “and the walls were all covered with his sheet music. My father, who loved this house beyond the beyond, loved the story of Buddy living here.” (The father in question, Samuel Z. Arkoff, was something of a Hollywood legend himself, producing more than 100 movies, including such beach-party sagas as How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, such monster flicks as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and such Edgar Allan Poe adaptations as Murders in the Rue Morgue. “I have a horror background,” Roth laughs.)

The beach house had been renovated a number of times over the years and had ended up fancy—“a Beverly Hills version of a house by the sea,” says Smith with a smidgen of distaste. The first call he made after his client bought the place was to bring in New Yorkñbased architect Oscar Shamamian to renovate the kitchen and baths, add millwork, put in reclaimed-chestnut floors and replace the four cast-cement fireplaces (“They were too modern, too big, and felt really cold,” Roth recalls) with old wooden ones. Elevating as well as restoring as he went along, Shamamian nevertheless artfully left the original Dutch doors and leaded windows and kept what Smith describes as the house’s “slightly off-center center-hall plan,” since “Donna loves sort of rambling New Englandy farmhouses.”

Roth wanted everything flexible, comfortable and relaxed. One of the reasons she has always used Smith, she maintains, is that he implicitly understands how families function. “He’s very realistic—he doesn’t try to set you up in a situation you can’t keep up,” she says. “His interiors, aside from being kind of impossibly beautiful, really work; he allows for real life to happen in them.”

In the 20-by-40-foot living room, the palette is blue and burnt red—warm and rich. “The thing about Malibu,” Smith explains, “is it’s foggy a lot, it can be chilly, and Donna tends to use her beach house all year round, so it was about making a place that wouldn’t only be great in the blazing sun of August but that would be pretty in all seasons.” A lot of the art that they collected for the house sounds the ancient note of the ocean—hanging over the Federal mantel is a big early-19th-century painting that majestically depicts a burial at sea. The 18th-century Dutch secretary in the corner is “a fascinating piece,” Roth offers, because it has secret compartments that harbor secret compartments of their own.

“My whole house is open—I have a very open-door policy.”

With the dining room, the aim was to create a room that felt informal but not, as the designer puts it, “rickety-beach”—a room that was solid, with some sense of tradition to it. The chairs are circa 1850 American, the carpet circa 1900 Sultanabad, and the pine dresser that’s filled to brimming with Roth’s collection of creamware antique Welsh. The not-so-very-high ceiling here is original to the house. “I like it low,” Roth says. “It’s sweet low.”

The family room, fully as capacious as the living room, is closest to the ocean and so was conceived to have the feeling of a poolhouse or boathouse. To that end, it’s cooler than it is cozy—sliding glass doors open to the rippling Pacific. A wall-to-wall window seat with big round bolsters is “great to take naps on,” Roth reports, as must also be the antique wicker sofa that Smith picked up in Maine.

The spacious and inviting kitchen is the room that Roth, who “actively cooks and bakes,” was most involved in designing. It was fitted out exactly to her needs, down to the merest refrigerator drawer—organized like a puzzle. The pocket doors have never, she insists, been closed. “My whole house is open—I grew up in a welcoming home, and I have a very open-door policy.”

The cathedral-ceilinged master bedroom has a soft palette—gray blue and glazed-down yellow. The antique carpet is Indian (an Agra), but Roth’s collection of glass, on coruscating display in the bookshelves, is strictly Imperial Yellow Peking. “It’s a mustard color, and it catches the light in the most extraordinary way,” she says. On one side of the faux-bamboo bed that Smith based on an American Aesthetic Movement original is a great flea-market find of a night table—bamboo with a green-painted top—and, on the other, a pretty English chest of drawers.

The late-19th-century clover-top table in the splashy master bath Smith bought in Paris—“It must be Japanese for the European market,” he says, “judging from its marquetry patchwork of all different kinds of wood.” Roth says she prizes it for being “so intricate and elegant and at the same time so beautifully broken-in and natural.” She could as well be speaking of the house as a whole.

“You know when you see beach houses that actually look stiff?” Smith throws in. “The house that I did for Donna admittedly looks ‘together,’ but there’s nothing prissy or overrefined about it. Hey, there are dogs and kids and a cat here, and if something gets chewed or torn or knocked over, it’s not the end of the world.”